Sofukuji Temple Sanmon Gate (Romon Gate)

Sōfukuji Sanmon: The Dragon Palace Gate of Nagasaki

Climb the slope from the Sōfukuji tram terminus and the first building you reach is a gate painted bright vermilion, its upper story carrying a curved tiled roof ringed by a balustrade. People in Nagasaki call it the Ryūgūmon, the Dragon Palace Gate, after the undersea palace of the Urashima Tarō folk tale. Its formal name is the Sanmon, the outer gate of Sōfukuji, and the structure standing today dates from 1849.

The name sanmon, literally "three gates," comes from its layout: a central doorway with a smaller gate to either side. The base is rammed stone and tile finished in white plaster, and above it sits a two-story timber gate with a hip-and-gable roof in heavy formal tiles. That contrast of red lacquer against white plaster is the image most travelers carry away from a first visit.

A Chinese temple founded by Fujian merchants

Sōfukuji belongs to the Ōbaku school of Zen and goes by the mountain name Seijuzan. Chinese residents from Fuzhou in Fujian province founded it in 1629, inviting the monk Chōnen from their home region to serve as its first priest. So many of its patrons came from Fuzhou that the temple is also known as Fukushūji. It is one of Nagasaki's three Tang temples, together with Kōfukuji and Fukusaiji, and it counts as the oldest Chinese-style temple in Japan.

Most of the temple's older halls were built in an unusual way. Timber was cut and fitted in China, carried across by trading junk, and assembled in Nagasaki by Chinese craftsmen. Two of those buildings, the Daiippōmon gate and the Daiyūhōden main hall, are National Treasures.

The Sanmon breaks that pattern. An earlier gate on this spot was lost to fire and storm. When it was rebuilt in the fourth month of 1849, the work was carried out entirely by Japanese craftsmen under the master carpenter Ōgushi Gorohei. The result is the most thoroughly Chinese-looking structure in the precinct, yet it is also the newest, and the only major gate made by Japanese hands.

Why it is an Important Cultural Property

The gate was placed under national protection in 1906 and today carries the designation of Important Cultural Property. Part of its value lies in the contradiction just described: a building that reads as purely Chinese in feeling, executed by local builders working from Chinese models rather than from imported parts.

Architecturally it is a rōmon, a two-story gate in which only the upper floor carries a roof of its own. The frontage spans three bays and the depth two. The upper roof is hip-and-gable, tiled in the formal pan-and-cover manner and wrapped by a railed gallery, while the two side gates have their own plastered bases and tiled roofs. Sōfukuji's older halls show the Ming-to-early-Qing styles brought directly from the continent, and the Sanmon carries that vocabulary forward into the closing decades of the Edo period.

What to look for

Stand back before you pass through. A pair of Chinese-style guardian lions sits in front of the gate, their stout and slightly comic forms closer to continental stone lions than to the lean koma-inu of Japanese shrines.

Then look up to the second story. A plaque reading Seijuzan, the temple's mountain name, hangs there, attributed to the brush of Ingen, the Chinese monk who established the Ōbaku school in Japan.

The roof repays attention as well, for almost everything on it guards against fire. Paired ornaments shaped like the makara, a creature whose body is said to be made of water, ride the ridge and the ceiling of the passage, joined by a gourd form at the center. For a wooden gate that had already burned once, the charm was no idle decoration. Set into the doors are ring handles backed by animal masks, which the temple describes as the only example of their kind in Japan, though the pieces hanging today are reproductions.

Around the temple

The Sanmon opens onto a compact precinct that rewards an unhurried hour. Beyond the gate, a flight of stone steps climbs to the Daiippōmon, a National Treasure whose bracket complex was cut in Ningbo and shipped over; its four-tiered brackets have no parallel anywhere in Japan. Higher still stands the Daiyūhōden of 1646, the main hall and the oldest surviving building in Nagasaki, also a National Treasure. The bell-and-drum tower, the Gohōdō, and the Maso gate are all Important Cultural Properties.

The surrounding district is worth walking too. A short distance north along the Teramachi temple row stands Kōfukuji, another of the three Tang temples and the oldest Ōbaku temple in the country. Between the two runs the Nakashima River, crossed by Meganebashi, the spectacles bridge of 1634, regarded as the oldest stone arch bridge in Japan and once part of Kōfukuji's approach.